Behind the Scenes with Culture Hero Andre Gregory

The director Andre Gregory is
turning 79 next month and still at work. Two plays will appear
later this year; Jonathan Demme’s film of Gregory’s production of
Ibsen’s The Master Builder is in
the offing. Gregory is the subject of a new film, Before
and After Dinner. The director of this documentary, Cindy
Kleine, was granted what feels like unfettered access to the
subject, who, in addition to being a fellow director, is also her
husband. We spoke with her by phone the day after the film opened
in New York.

“I didn’t want to make some kind of traditional biopic or
television-style documentary about a great artist,” Kleine said.
“And I certainly couldn’t do that, as his wife. I make personal
films. So I knew it was going to be a personal film. And I wanted
to, at the same time, depict a good marriage in a film, because I’d
almost never seen a good marriage depicted in films since Mrs.
Miniver, made in 1942.”

The Designated Mourner returns to the stage on
June 21st; Grasses of a Thousand Colors follows in
October.

Kleine’s film isn’t the sort of thing you’d see on American
Masters. A mix of to-camera interviews, archival footage, and fly
on the wall camera work, it’s not a slick film, because it’s more
interested in personality than polish. The film is slippery, which
in the end nicely suits its subject—which is not Gregory, who is
quite forthcoming, but truth.

“The more I saw Andre’s work in rehearsals, and work in the
world, the more I felt surprised that nobody had documented it
before,” Kleine said. “He sort of has flown under the radar for so
long, and not been acknowledged, in a way, by the traditional
theater community, because the work is quite avant-garde. But I
felt like it was time to really make people see and understand what
this incredible work that he does is, and what a director does.
Because I think it’s true—people go to the theater all the time,
and they say, ‘Oh, I love this play,’ or ‘I love that play,’ or ‘I
love the writing,’ or whatever. But it’s very hard to understand
what a director actually does. And in his case, even more so,
because what he does is so different from what anyone else
does.”

Gregory is often called experimental, which makes you imagine
oblique language, heavy-handed symbolism, inexplicable nudity.
Gregory’s storied 70s-era adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland—snippets of which appear in Before and After
Dinner—might have adhered to some of those stereotypes. His
work that’s been captured on film (the way most audiences know him
as his theatrical productions often play to very small crowds,
sometimes by invitation only), Vanya on 42nd Street and
My Dinner with Andre, both by Louis Malle, belies this
reputation. Vanya is moving in a way that must be close to what
Chekhov intended. The only thing that feels experimental about it
now is Brooke Smith’s classic 90s
printed-dress-over-long-sleeve-top ensemble.

What’s
experimental isn’t Gregory’s product; it’s his process.Before and After Dinner shows us Gregory and team feeling
their way through The Master Builder. Despite its title,
Kleine’s movie is a compelling teaser for the Ibsen more than it is
a key to understanding My Dinner with Andre.

“I wanted to shoot the rehearsals and put in the archival bits,
because nothing he does is documented,” said Kleine. “And that’s
true in most work in the theater, whereas with film, there’s this
both thrilling and terrifying thing where once you cut it and
finish it, then it goes up on the screen, or it goes onto DVD, it’s
done. I find the fact that he sits and watches the actors rehearse
the same play over and over and over… I mean, I would be asleep.
The actors are totally brilliant, but I just wouldn’t have the
patience. And he sees it as new every time, because, as he says, it
is new every time they do it, because they’re doing it in a
different moment. And he’s endlessly—you see in the film—he’s
endlessly interested and fascinated and engaged. His mind never
wanders. It’s like what I’ve always wondered about therapists and
psychiatrists—how do they sit there and listen to people for that
long and not get bored and not forget what they say?”

As scenes from Ibsen’s drama are played out inside the apartment
living room where the company is rehearsing, we hear Gregory,
cooing appreciatively: “Beautiful. Great. Great.” Before and
After Dinner gives us only fleeting scenes from that play,
performed by actors surrounded by the less-than-photogenic detritus
of actual life. But even divorced from their larger context, these
moments are surprisingly moving. Larry Pine, who has worked with
Gregory for years (a casting director’s beau ideal of a
high-ranking government functionary, which he plays in both
“Homeland” and “House of Cards”) relates an anecdote in which
Gregory had an actor wait in silence for more than an hour before
beginning his performance. It worked, Pine said, and the
performance was perfect—and gone now, as is the nature of live
work. Gregory approaches directing with the patience of a novelist.
“Certainly there’s a parallel in how long we work on things,” said
Kleine, who started work on her film in 2009, “and how we both feel
that in order to complete something in the finest way, to bring it
to light, it really takes that kind of time. And that’s completely
anathema in the world of both theater and filmmaking.”

Early in the movie, the camera catches Wallace Shawn, Gregory’s
most well known collaborator, in an unguarded moment. Shawn gets
what seems like angry, though perhaps you’d have to know him
personally to read the actual emotion as he scolds the camera and,
by extension, the director.

“He’s a person of great privacy,” said Kleine. “And I know him
well enough to know that. And so before I even started shooting the
film, I went to him to ask his permission, to ask him to be in the
film, because I knew I couldn’t make a film about Andre without
having Wally in the film. That would be impossible. He’s like his
other half. And he’s in the play, and I knew I wanted to shoot the
rehearsals of the play, and I knew that was something that Wally’s
never, ever allowed anyone to do. So we had many conversations,
many long conversations, and really talked through his feelings
about it. And basically, that boiled down to him saying, ‘If you
were anyone else, I would say no. I’m not comfortable with the idea
of being in a documentary.’ And this, I completely understood: he
said, ‘I find it to be a lie, in a certain way, to pretend that a
camera is not there.’ None of us are going to behave the way we
would in front of a camera the same way we would if the camera
wasn’t there, in other words. There’s always going to be some
alteration. It’s impossible to be completely yourself, and not be
aware of the camera on you.”

The presence of documentarians alters the reality they’re trying
to capture. “I said, well, but I don’t really care if you pretend
the camera’s not there. You can address the camera if you want to.
You can just talk to the camera. That’s fine. And that made him
feel comfortable enough to move ahead. And then he continually did
that. He just would address the camera, which I loved. To me, that
brings a whole other layer of kind of honesty and inquiry into, you
know, what is a documentary? What is truth? What is honesty?”

My
Dinner with Andre seems like it’s hard to understand.
Because Andre is playing Andre, and the titular “me” is Wally
playing someone called Wally. What they relate—Andre’s sojourn with
radical theater director Jerzy Grotowski, Wally’s career as a
then-struggling playwright and actor with a girlfriend named
Debbie—hews closely to the truth. It feels like a documentary; it
feels like the truth, though both men maintain that it’s art, not
life.

Before and After Dinner teases that out further. Is the
Andre on screen truly Andre? “I was interested in making a film
about a well-known person’s public and private persona,” said
Kleine. “Andre and I will be out in the world for dinner, and
somebody will come over who kind of worships him and saw him in
My Dinner with Andre, and the film changed their life and
all that. And I watch people treat him with a kind of awe, like
they would a great rabbi or priest or something. I guess this is
the documentary filmmaker in me, but I’m always kind of interested
and slightly amused, because I see him at home, at every moment,
where he can be completely goofy, and silly and running out of the
house to a meeting, and I have to tell him, ‘Honey, you have your
slippers on.’ It’s always amusing to me that everybody who’s in any
way well-known, and that includes really famous people, they’re
just private people in their life, you know?”

One of the documentary’s best moments is Gregory, naked save a
shower cap, lounging in a hot tub, mugging for the camera. “I do
see it as a metaphor for his really unguarded nakedness, both as a
director and as a person,” said Kleine. “And he just has no
self-consciousness. It’s amazing to me. I’ve never met anyone else
like that. I’m not going to say he doesn’t have self-doubt, because
privately, he certainly does, like we all do. But he just is very
secure and comfortable in himself, and just will do whatever he
feels like doing, and he doesn’t think ‘Is this embarrassing?’ It’s
so unlike anybody I know. Certainly myself. So it became a really
important moment. And then, you know, the humor, for me, in it —it
just completely cracks me up.” We know of Gregory’s biography from
My Dinner with Andre, and learn much more in this
film—about his upper crust upbringing, his tyrannical father, who
may or may not have been an actual war criminal, the investigation
into which forms the dramatic arc of Kleine’s movie. Here, Gregory
is naked in every possible way.

Kleine isn’t literally naked in the film, but there is an
excellent slideshow of all her former boyfriends, a parade of
personal snapshots of beautiful shirtless men, at least one of whom
is a decade younger than her. Gregory is more than two decades
Kleine’s elder, but their relationship is an inversion of what we
expect from our May/December romances: the younger woman with a
rich romantic history meets an older man who despite his charm and
professed love of women is practically virginal. Kleine’s project
seems crazy; who would want to scrutinize their spouse this
closely?

“It actually has made us much closer, because it’s been the
first true collaboration,” said Kleine. “We’ve always helped each
other with each other’s work. I’ve always gone to rehearsals that
Andre’s doing, and he’s always looked at cuts of things, since
we’ve been together. And we’ve talked about work. But we’ve never
actually collaborated like we did on this. And it was strange, at
times…. There are always going to be tricky, difficult issues in
any marriage, and I feel like as long as you can laugh at them,
that sort of gets you over it. But in the end, he loves —you can
tell—being on. He loves telling stories. He loves being on camera.
He loves being in the spotlight. I mean, this is his favorite
movie.”

More than once in this film, Gregory refers to himself as a
shaman. It’s a word appropriate for a man who’s clearly studied
various mystic traditions and relies on storytelling to enchant as
much to entertain. He tells of running into Spaulding Gray in a Los
Angeles hotel. A parallel between the late Gray and Gregory (beyond
how both managed to maintain careers in Hollywood while continuing
their own idiosyncratic work) is the extent to which their art and
their biography are braided together. Gregory speaks of how he’s
drawn to material that reflects some truth of his own life.
Alice in Wonderland was about making your way in a world
where every person you meet is, in his word, a mindfuck; one can
imagine why Gregory was drawn to The Master Builder’s tale
of an old man yearning to feel young and great.

Gregory
turns in a shamanistic performance as John the Baptist in
Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and in Before
and After Dinner recounts his audition process. He tells
of going into a trance, stripping naked and raving during a private
meeting with the director. Then Kleine produces the tape of that
meeting. Gregory’s audition is killer, but he’s not naked and not
raving.

“Andrei Tarkovsky, who’s my favorite filmmaker, said, ‘Never try
to convey your idea to the audience. It is a thankless and
senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves
the means to assess and appreciate it.’ It’s an amazing quote, and
I think that applies certainly, to My Dinner with Andre, and
to my work, too,” said Kleine. “We were seeing, in editing, the
structure of the film as a spiral. The little turns, the little
twists that go around the screw, let’s say. So we would start one
line of story, and the minute you think, ‘This is going to be a
personal film this woman is making about her husband’ then suddenly
you’re in these rehearsals, and it’s a film about this man’s work.
And then, when you think that’s what it’s about, it suddenly
becomes this film noir detective story. But the threads keep coming
back, like the threads on the screw. It keeps circling around back
to the other stories. So at that point, what I was interested in
was to address the nature of memory and storytelling, and the
question of what is the truth. What I was trying to say is, there
is no such thing, really, as truth. Like, Andre’s truth is just his
sort of myth, and his story, the way he remembers it. But we all
have that,” she said. “We each have our own myth that we kind of
invent.”